Gordon Monro's blog

"Art Sparks" Creative Gathering, Ballarat

2012-01-26T20:24:00.000+11:00

This is an initiative by Amy Tsilemanis to bring together people interested in the arts in Ballarat. The next gathering is on Tuesday 31st of January at Linda Franklin's South Street Art Studio.There will be a vegetarian feast, and then five artists, including me, will be performing or showing work. They range over music, storytelling and visual art; I will play a couple of my abstract videos. A good chance to meet and talk with people. The five featured artists are Al Wunder, Yasmin Cole, Gordon Monro, Anne Langdon and Janette Wotherspoon.

Where: South Street Art Studio, 410 South Street, Ballarat VIC 3350. (This is the old church on the corner with Errard St.)
Tel: 0438 826 500.
When: Tuesday 31st of January 201, 6.30 - 9.30pm.
Cost: Suggested: gold coin donation.
Info: On Facebook - search for "Art Sparks in Ballarat" and "South Street Art Studio".

Video in Ballarat Art Gallery "Project Window"

2011-12-21T11:38:00.001+11:00

My video Dissonant Particles is scheduled for the "Project Window" of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, in January 2012. The Project Window is a projection window, part of the front of the Gallery on Lydiard Street, and the projections run in the evenings. The Project Window opened in 2011 and has shown works by some high-profile people, including Daniel Crooks and Jill Orr.

Where: Ballarat Art Gallery, 40 Lydiard St (North), Ballarat VIC 3350. Tel: 03 5320 5858.
When: 5th - 27th January 2012.
Info: http://www.balgal.com/ and http://www.gommog.com/video/diss_part_video.html.

"Bagdad, 1000: The Origin of the Pixel"

2011-12-13T14:10:00.000+11:00

I have been looking at a recent book by Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. Chapter seven is entitled "Bagdad, 1000: The Origin of the Pixel". Did the pixel really originate in Bagdad around the year 1000? Well, no.

From about the eighth century to the thirteenth the Islamic world was the place to be: the arts, the sciences and philosophy flourished in a manner not matched in the Christian West. The West indeed learnt from the Islamic world: "algebra", "alkali" and "sugar" are Arabic words, as are the names of some of the prominent Northern hemisphere stars such as Algol and Betelgeuse. One of the first mathematics books printed with movable type was Euclid's Elements (Venice 1482); the text was in Latin, translated from the Arabic, as a Greek text did not become available in Western Europe until after 1500. The contribution of the Islamic world to Western civilisation has been under-appreciated, and attempts are now being made to better recognise this contribution. Enfoldment and Infinity is a very well-informed addition to this discussion.

Marks's book compares two bodies of art, Islamic art and new media art, especially that based on computer algorithms; she calls both "aniconic": the perceptible image is not the most important part of the art. Islam generally prohibited the use of images of people or animals in religious contexts; in some places (though by no means everywhere) the prohibition was extended to secular works as well. An extraordinary aniconic art arose as a consequence, based on calligraphy, geometric forms and plant motifs, incidentally giving us the word "arabesque". Marks's book makes numerous and striking comparisons between Islamic art and art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cinema and new media art.

How does the history of the pixel come into this? In Chapter seven, Marks discusses two constructs in Islamic art and philosophy that might relate to the pixel. One is an architectural technique based on the repetition of a single cell-like form and used to construct remarkable domes. The other is an atomistic philosophy holding that the created universe consists of indivisible atoms, developed in the ninth century by philosophers known as the Mu'tazila. At least one writer conceived of these atoms as square or cubical. But this tells us nothing about the genealogy of the pixel, and Marks does not make any historical link between these developments in the Islamic world and the pixel as we now have it. Nor does she discuss a much more obvious predecessor of the pixel, the mosaic tile.

So, let's make up another origin of the pixel. A fundamental property of a pixel in a raster display is that it is addressable: I can specify a pixel with a notation like (2, 21), meaning a pixel that is two along in the horizontal direction and 21 down in the vertical direction. Iannis Xenakis considered coordinate geometry to be a gift from music to mathematics: on a musical staff time is measured horizontally and pitch vertically. Furthermore in Western musical notation both pitch and time are discrete; time is measured in multiples of some small unit (the semibreve in older music) and pitch in semitones. I can specify both coordinates with a phrase like "the G (or, the note on the second line of the staff) on the first beat of bar 17". So we have a two-dimensional addressable array of discrete entities. I conclude that the pixel originated in Western musical notation of the thirteenth century. Except that it didn't. (And I don't think there is an Islamic link here. Some Western musical instruments derived from Islamic sources, but the notation is indigenous to the West.)

In fairness, Marks warns us that her genealogies may be fictitious. In the first chapter she says "I exploit ... unsought connections perversely, to behave as if there were a historical continuity where at times there is not". Indeed she tells us that Islamic atomistic philosophy was not transmitted to the West. She goes on to say: "if someone puts down this book believing that the Mu'tazila atomists invented the pixel ... that is fine by me". A strange attitude for a scholar and teacher, but one that is necessary to bear in mind while engaging with the book; and it is an engaging book.

Analogue Swallows Digital

2011-10-08T16:21:00.000+11:00

Last week I attended Impact7, billed as the "international multi-disciplinary printmaking conference", at Monash University in Melbourne. This is the seventh in a series of conferences that began in England in 1999. The core subject-matter of the conference was traditional printmaking: woodcuts, drypoint, etching and so forth. However, there were a substantial number of presentations referring to digital media, and presentations exploring links between print-making and artists' book, zines, photography and graphic design. There was also considerable discussion of education in the visual arts. In the four days there were nearly 150 presentations (talks and demonstrations) and a substantial number of exhibitions.

I was curious to know how the traditional print-makers have reacted to the invasion of their field by Photoshop, inkjet printers and so forth. The answer appears to be that the new methods have simply been incorporated into print-making practice: there were repeated references to the new technologies as providing just another set of tools, and discussion of the "expanded field" of print-making. Analogue has swallowed digital. Whatever debate there was in the printmaking community about digital media is now over, though occasionally concern was expressed that the "hand" of the artist might be missing. I did hear a response to the effect that the mind of the artist is more important.

My own presentation argued that the computer can be more than a tool and that having outsourced the work of the artist's hand to machines, we are now starting to outsource the work of the artist's mind to machines also.

Visual Music Films, Multimedia Performance

2011-10-02T17:58:00.001+11:00

Brigid Burke has organised a multi-media night at Loop bar in Melbourne. One of my abstract videos will be played, along with works by Dennis Miller and Grayson Cook, and there will be a live performance by Brigid Burke and Adrian Sheriff, playing clarinet, trombone, shakuhachi and laptop, with live video projections.

Where: Loop Bar Back Room, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne. (Meyers Place is on the south side of Bourke Street, between Exhibition and Spring Streets, near Parliament Station.)
When: Wednesday 5th October, 7pm.
Info: http://www.brigid.com.au/performances.asp and http://www.looponline.com.au/.

Impact7 Conference

2011-09-23T14:41:00.000+10:00

There is an international conference at Monash University coming up called Impact7. It is billed as the "International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference" and is held every two years. The core topic is traditional print-making, but many other areas are involved, and there is a substantial digital media stream. I will be giving a presentation as part of a session on "Digital Media: Aesthetics and Materiality" in the morning of Thursday 27th September.

The conference website: http://impact7.org.au/.

In association with this conference half the art galleries in Melbourne are putting on exhibitions of prints: there is a list at http://impact7.org.au/mofp/index.html. The Art Gallery of Ballarat (where I live) specialises in works on paper, and it is putting on a substantial exhibition of prints from its collection, from the colonial period on. The Gallery's website is at http://www.artgalleryofballarat.com.au/.

St Patrick's College Ballarat Art Prize

2011-08-23T10:01:00.000+10:00

My work Tree Circle has been selected for the St Patrick's College Ballarat Art Prize.

Where: St Patrick's College Ballarat, Old Collegians Pavilion. (Entry from Wanliss St.)
When: September 7 to September 11 2011.
Gala launch: Wednesday September 7th at 7pm. Entry by ticket from the College.

More information here (go to "Community" and then "Flanagan Art Prize").

London and Home

2011-08-16T21:48:00.000+10:00

I spent a week in London before heading home. The riots there erupted the night before I left, but not in central London, and I only found out about them from a TV in the airport as I was waiting for my flight to Australia.

In London I spent time at the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, but I also looked at the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Museum, all wonderful institutions.

Ai Weiwei, "Sunflower Seeds" (ceramic), 2010

The Natural History Museum, as well as having some spectacular displays, is a great research institution and holds hundreds of thousands of so-called type specimens. A type specimen is the first specimen of a species to be described scientifically, and acts as a reference for all subsequent work on that species.

Spectacle: the entrance to the Earth Sciences display in the Natural History Museum

And the Science Museum has a range of material from Stephenson's "Rocket" locomotive (1829) to the Apollo 10 command module, that flew round the Moon in 1969.

Diagram in the Science Museum showing the geometric construction of one of the elaborate illustrations from the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript

I saw the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript itself in the British Library (though of course it was only open at one page, which wasn't this one). The manuscript dates from 700 AD or shortly afterwards, so to see it at all was astonishing enough.

So ends my grand art tour.

Multi-cultural Paris

2011-08-07T05:18:00.011+10:00

My trip is drawing to an end: Rome, Paris, London, home. I'm now in London.

I spent most of my time in Paris in the Pompidou Centre, looking at the wonderful collections of modern art, contemporary art, and new media; also Brancusi's atelier, which is packed full of his sculptures.

František Kupka, "Disques de Newton, Étude pour fugue à deux couleurs" (1911-12)

I also saw three exhibitions from or involving non-Western cultures. The first was a special exhibition at the Pompidou called "Paris-Delhi-Bombay". Work by Indian artists, and by some European artists responding to Indian culture.

Subodh Gupta, "Ali Baba" (installation)

The second exhibition was at the Bibliothèque Nationale, of illuminated Islamic manuscripts from the Bibliothèque's collection. The accompanying text pointed out something I certainly hadn't appreciated. Islam spread to cover three main language areas, speaking Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Religious texts generally did not show animals or humans, so there were some wonderful examples of calligraphy and geometric patterning in the religious works. But only in the Arabic-speaking area was the ban on showing animals and humans applied to all (or almost all) texts. Thus there are Turkish and Persian illustrated manuscripts showing warriors and heroes, animals, the constellations represented as people or animals (as the West did also), events from legends or fairy tales, gardens with princes in them, and so on. There was even an anatomical treatise. Sorry, no photographs, but there is an exhibition website at http://expositions.bnf.fr/islam/.

The third exhibition was of Vodun (Voodoo) objects from West Africa, and claimed to be the first exhibition devoted entirely to these objects. These are not primarily artworks, but are considered to have magical properties, to ward off harm or to cause harm to one's enemies. Most of them consisted of a small wooden human-like statue (often with two heads) with additions such as bones, pieces of metal, padlocks and pill bottles, very often bound around with twine. The exhibition was very well laid out (by the Italian designer Enzo Mari) and ended with a funeral chariot placed in a small pond with black water. Again no photographs, but there is a website on this material at http://www.vaudou-vodun.com/.

And finally a non-human culture: I went to an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo that consisted essentially of a large ants' next, filled with large leaf-cutter ants.

Robin Meier and Ali Momeni, "The Tragedy of the Commons" (detail)

MAXXI in Rome

2011-07-26T06:28:00.000+10:00

My trip included some days in Rome; I visited several contemporary art galleries, including the newest of them, MAXXI (Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, or National Museum of the Arts of the 21st Century). It is in a stunning building, designed by Zaha Hadid, based around sweeping parallel curves. When it opened it attracted mixed reviews for its suitability as an art gallery, with one reviewer describing it as "tyrannical", and people I know who have visited it have described it as completely overpowering the art. On my visit I didn't feel this, at least with respect to the main exhibition, a massive retrospective for Michelangelo Pistoletto, about whom I knew nothing. Since there isn't a lot of 21st century art yet, the gallery condescends to show 20th century art, and the Pistoletto retrospective covered the years 1956-1974 (though I think Pistoletto is still active).

One of our lecturers at Prato commented that in Australia we tend to have an Anglo-American-centric view of art after World War 2, and my trip has borne this out: Pistoletto is one of four significant 20th century Italian artists whose work I have encountered in the time I have spent in Italy. The others were Marino Marini in Pistoia and Giorgio Morandi in Bologna, both thanks to the Prato program, and Bice Lazzaro in Rome. I should say that others in the group knew about at least some of these people - I shouldn't generalise too much from my own ignorance!

Pistoletto's work as shown in the MAXXI exhibition covered a wide range: his figurative paintings on mirrors were notable, but he also made works in the 1960s relating to both conceptual and minimal art, was a leader of the Arte Povera movement, made works using industrial materials such as Mylar film, and also had a performing group that held events both in galleries and in public spaces. My favourite "conceptual" work in the show was "A Cubic Metre of Infinity", six mirrors lashed together to form a cube with the mirrored surfaces on the inside. From the outside it is just a grey box, and of course you can't see the inside.

The exhibition contained an interesting timeline showing events in Pistoletto's career in parallel with events in Italian politics, ranging from postwar bitterness and reconstruction (Pistoletto was born in 1933), through to the student unrest in the 1960s and the sabotage and kidnappings carried out by the Red Brigades. The work shown was not political in a sloganeering way, but was certainly related to the spirit of the times. Another lecturer in Prato said that according to an Italian artist friend of his, Florence was the hardest city in the world to be a contemporary artist, and surely Italy must be one of the hardest countries. Pistoletto, who lived in or around the industrial city of Turin rather than the history-of-art-laden tourist magnet of Florence, nonetheless found a way.

No pictures of the works inside, unfortunately, but this is the entrance to MAXXI.

And this is MAXXI's foyer. The building is pretty well unphotographable!

Leaving Prato

2011-07-14T23:59:00.002+10:00

Today is the last day of the program at Monash's outpost in Prato, Italy. There have been numerous highlights. The Venice Biennale was certainly one. I am not going to try to review it - I didn't see all of it, even in the three and a half days I spent looking at it, and there are plenty of reviews on-line. My favourite work was the installation by James Turrell, one of his "Ganzfeld" series. I also enjoyed the Greek pavilion very much, a beautifully quiet space. The official Chinese exhibition was tasteful and restrained, but the less official Chinese work tended to be big and brash; maybe it is the successor in this respect to American art of the post-war era.

Not quite part of the Biennale, the exhibition in the Palazzo Fortuny had an eclectic mix of very interesting works in a wonderful setting. We also visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, with numerous significant twentieth-century works. I was interested to see some Italian Futurist work in a separate collection, including a painting by Giacomo Balla representing the transit of Mercury in front of the Sun, from 1914.

On the way to and from Venice we visited Ravenna, to see the Byzantine mosaics, and Padua to see the Giotto cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel. Both of these visits were highlights for me as well.

I have also seen some more things connected with the history of science. I visited the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna which in the 18th century housed a scientific institute and now contains an eclectic museum representing the diverse interests of this institute, ranging from optics to map-making to anatomy to fortifications; there is also a room with remarkable models of sailing ships. Some of the material is from collections going back to the 16th century.

Detail of navigational map of the known world from 1556.

An unexpected find was the International Museum and Library of Music in Bologna, providing a connection between art and science in the form of Renaissance tuning theory.

Keyboard with 31 notes to the octave, from 1606

I also visited the Museo Galileo in Florence. Not only do they have the only two telescopes ascribable with certainty to Galileo, they also have relics in the form of some of Galileo's fingerbones! Both the Museo Galileo and the museum of the Palazzo Poggi brought out the connection between geometry and warfare; Galileo had a business making and selling "geometric and military compasses", a multi-purpose instrument designed by him and intended for aiming cannons, among other things.

I have seen one museum of present-day science, the Museum of Planetary Science here in Prato. It is an active centre of research, and has the best collection of meteorites I am ever likely to see.

A Martian meteorite, ejected from Mars, and found in the Sahara desert in 1997. It weighs two kilograms and is the largest specimen of a Martian meteorite on display in Europe.

My next stop is Rome.

Monash Prato

2011-06-25T06:51:00.000+10:00

All those people who post about their wonderful overseas jaunts - now it's my turn! I am taking part in a postgraduate art program at Monash University's outpost in Prato, near Florence. Prato is a town with an attractive mediaeval core and a historic cathedral with frescoes by Fra Filippo Lippi, Uccello, Gaddi and others. We're staying a stone's throw away from the cathedral, and the sounds of bells of the cathedral and other churches are quite prominent.

The cloister behind the cathedral in Prato.

Prato is a short train ride away from Florence, and we have made several visits there, including a rather strenuous tour of the Uffizi gallery yesterday, which was fairly astonishing: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli.... Perhaps the highlight for me so far was our trip to Siena, but shortly we're off to Venice for several days to visit the Venice Biennale. All this is very exciting, and will take a long time to assimilate.

I've been looking out for things relating to Renaissance science, and was interested to discover that in Florence both the Duomo and Santa Maria Novella have inbuilt astronomical instruments in the form of a small hole high up in the structure to let in a ray of sunlight, and markings on the floor of the church. Among other things they were used to determine the length of the year precisely. I bought a small book explaining all this, but unfortunately it's in Italian.

The circle of sunlight on the floor of the Duomo in Florence. It is supposed to coincide with the marble circle at noon on the summer solstice - this photograph was taken a week before the solstice.

"Odyssey" at Space 22, Ballarat

2011-06-25T05:59:00.001+10:00

The artist-run gallery Space 22 in Ballarat is having its last exhibition for a while. The lease is ending and the landlord wants to do something else with the space. So Space 22 is having a final group exhibition with all the people who have been associated with the gallery (which includes me).

Where: Space 22, 22 Main Road, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia.

When: 16th June to 3rd July, 2011.

Gallery hours: Thursday to Sunday inclusive, 12 noon - 5pm.

More information here.

Let's hope Space 22 is able to re-emerge in some form, as it has been a great thing for the artistic community in Ballarat. The committee have put in a huge amount of hard work, and deserve our heartfelt thanks for what they have achieved for us all.

"Shaping Evolution" at Pigment Gallery, Melbourne

2011-04-04T20:51:00.000+10:00

I have an exhibition coming up at Pigment Gallery in Melbourne.

"Shaping Evolution" shows digital prints and a short video of imaginary creatures evolved by a computer program I have written. Each creature has "DNA" (a small amount of data in the computer) that generates its image. The creatures were evolved from random starting DNA by processes of "breeding", "mutation" and "survival of the fittest", carried out automatically in the computer. I am showing the "DNA" as well as the generated images.

Where: Pigment Gallery, Level 2, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston St, Melbourne. (Enter via Cathedral Arcade, which is on Swanston Street, just before the Flinders Lane corner.)
Opening: Thursday April 14th, 5.30-7.30pm.
Exhibition dates: April 13 to April 30, 2011.
Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 12 noon - 5pm.

What’s in a name? (What is computer art?)

2011-02-03T10:46:00.002+11:00

(Long post)

On my website I have called myself a “digital media artist”. I don’t like that name very much; I would like to call myself a “generative artist”, but that would require an explanation. What I have not done is call myself a “computer artist”.

This is on my mind because I have been reading a short book called A Philosophy of Computer Art, by Dominic McIver Lopes (Routledge, 2010). I agree with much of what is in this book: there are interesting discussions of various topics, including “What is an artwork?”, and a vigorous defence of computer art against various attacks; the discussion extends to computer games. My biggest problem with the book is with the title: it should be called A Philosophy of Interactive Computer Art.

Lopes makes two central definitions, of “digital art” and of “computer art” (more precisely of the “computer art form”).

Digital art: An item is a work of digital art just in case (1) it’s art (2) made by computer or (3) made for display by computer (4) in a common, digital code. (Lopes p. 3)

(Here “display” has a broad meaning, so it includes sound and other forms of output.)

Computer art form: An item is a computer art work just in case (1) it’s art (2) it’s run on a computer (3) it’s interactive, and (4) it’s interactive because it’s run on a computer. (Lopes p. 27)

If Lopes had called this the “interactive computer art form” I would have little quarrel with it. As it is, I have two main problems with this definition. Firstly, it is too late. For most people, “computer art” brings to mind works made using programs like Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop; indeed this is why I don’t call myself a computer artist. Lopes’s book will not change this.

Secondly Lopes’s use rules out works that are computer art under any reasonable definition. Black Shoals by Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portway (http://www.blackshoals.net/), which is not discussed by Lopes, is a work that has virtual creatures breeding and evolving, feeding on real-time stock-market data. The work would be inconceivable without a computer, it changes in real time, and it is unpredictable, but according to Lopes’s discussion of the term “interactive” Black Shoals is not computer art, so by implication is lumped in with Photoshop collages and the like under “digital art”.

The difficulty arises because Lopes wishes to identify computer art as a new art form, as different from (for example) photography and painting as they are from each other. For Lopes, an art form is an appreciative art kind, defined as follows:

Appreciative art kind: A kind [of artwork] is an appreciative art kind just in case we normally appreciate a work in the kind by comparison with arbitrarily any other works in that kind. (Lopes p. 17)

Lopes goes on to argue that digital art is too broad a category to be considered an art form in this sense, which is surely true, and that (interactive) digital art is an art form in his sense; here I think he has drawn his boundaries too narrowly. Black Shoals can surely be appreciated by comparing it with a work like A-Volve by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/a-volve/), which also involves virtual creatures breeding and evolving, but where visitors can specify “DNA” for the creatures and interact with them once they are “born”. Yet for Lopes, A-Volve would count as belonging to the computer art form and Black Shoals would not.

If there is an art form that Black Shoals and A-Volve both belong to, what is it? I approach this via two more questions:

What is the most important characteristic of the computer? My answer: the computer autonomously carries out complex calculations and data manipulations. Interactivity is certainly not the most important characteristic; interactive computing only became widely available at least 20 years after electronic computers were introduced.
Is there an art form that has complex processes carried out autonomously as a defining characteristic? Yes: it is generative art.

Philip Galanter has given the following widely quoted definition:

Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist uses a system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. (Philip Galanter “What is generative art? Complexity theory as a context for art theory”, available at http://www.philipgalanter.com/downloads/ga2003_paper.pdf)

Two generative artworks, then, can be compared via a discussion of the rules or “procedural inventions” involved in the work. Black Shoals and A-Volve use very similar rules: they both make use of evolutionary ideas concerning breeding, mutation and survival of the fittest; altogether clearly they are similar works and are appreciated as such. The fact that one is interactive and the other isn’t is a relatively minor consideration in this case, and surely does not make the works so radically different as to force them to belong to different art forms.

Not all generative art is computer-based: for example Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings made according to systems of rules are generative art under Galanter’s definition. But the ready availability of computers has lifted generative art to a new level and, in my view, has made it visible as a distinct art form. (I also note that Lopes concedes that theoretically a work of computer art in his sense could run on a human brain rather than a silicon machine.)

Most unfortunately, Lopes does not discuss the concept of generative art at all. If one is looking for an art form that makes essential use of the characteristics of the computer, and that has been given both an enormous expansion of possibilities and recognition as a distinct kind of art by the availability of the computer, generative art is a strong candidate.

"Orbit" at Space 22

2011-01-20T10:00:00.001+11:00

I have a piece in the "Orbit" group exhibition at Space 22 in Ballarat.

Space 22 is the only artist-run space in Ballarat. It is celebrating its first anniversary with a group "30 x 30 (x 30) cm" exhibition: works have to fit into a 30 cm square or a 30 cm cube.

Where: Space 22, 22 Main Road, Ballarat.
Opening: Saturday January 22nd, 3-5pm.
Exhibition dates: January 20 to February 6, 2011.
Gallery hours: Thu-Sun 12 noon - 5pm.

"Showcase" at Gallery on Sturt

2010-12-04T10:25:00.003+11:00

The Gallery on Sturt at 421 Sturt St, Ballarat, Victoria has an exhibition called "Showcase", for artists associated with the gallery. I have one piece in the show, a digital print titled Darwinian Field 1. My association with the gallery is that they also have a fine art printing service, and Andrew Tweedie there made the prints for my exhibition in Arthur Gallery earlier in 2010.

The exhibition runs throughout December.
Opening hours: Monday - Friday 9am - 5:30pm, Saturday 10am - 4pm.

For more information see http://www.accentframing.com.au/gallery/exhibitions.asp.

Transdisciplinary imaging

2010-11-09T11:50:00.001+11:00

(Long post)

At the weekend I attended a two-day conference in Sydney, the First International Conference on Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture. The conference title was "New Imaging: Transdisciplinary strategies for art beyond the new media". The conference chairs were Su Baker (Victorian College of the Arts) and Paul Thomas (College of Fine Arts, University of NSW). The conference was held at Artspace in Wolloomooloo with support from a number of universities.

There were over twenty presentations. The "international" part of the title was justified in that several of the presenters, including all three keynote speakers, were from overseas. Altogether it seemed to be a fairly high-powered group, and I felt a little out of my depth (though I wasn't presenting). I am relatively new to this sort of discussion, so in my comments I may well have missed the point or misunderstood things.

All the presenters were either artists or people somewhere along the spectrum art historian, art theorist, cultural theorist, and the artists tended to be theorists as well. I had the impression that there are certain books and articles everybody there had read; the conference was part of a specific discourse despite its wide-ranging brief. Although science was mentioned in the conference title, no scientists presented as such, though Oron Catts (of SymbioticA in Perth) must be part-scientist, and a couple of the other artists have collaborated closely with scientists.

Rather than summarising the entire conference I mention the three keynote addresses and then try to indicate some common themes.

The opening presentation "Hyperskindexicality" was by Jens Hauser, an artist, writer and curator based in Paris; he gave a wide-ranging discussion of biological art, that is, art that uses living materials such as bacteria, skin cells, or genetically modified organisms. Jens broached a number of themes that recurred throughout the conference, including "indexicality" (after C.S. Peirce) and notions of representation, the nature of scientific visualisation, and the relation of "new media" to older media.

The second keynote presentation was by Roy Ascott from Plymouth University in England; Roy was physically at another conference in Norway and presented (before breakfast his time) via Skype and PowerPoint slides under the title "The Syncretic Dialogues". Roy is a visionary pioneer of cybernetic art, telematic art and art around the idea of complex systems; he has extended this to "technoetic arts", to bring in things like telekinesis, shamanic healing and a trans-human "field of consciousness". I felt that most of the audience could not follow Roy down the New Age path. Roy indicated five artists of the modern era as significant: Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Jackson Pollock, and the much less well-known Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who created a number of distinct personas, or "heteronyms", each of which is almost an independent author with a distinct writing style and set of concerns. Roy concluded "the most urgent eco-necessity is the re-design of ourselves".

The final keynote presentation was by Anne Ring Petersen from Denmark, on "The transdisciplinary potential of remediated painting". Anne discussed three artists who in her view are extending painting into new areas: Thorbjørn Lausten (Denmark), Katharina Grosse (Germany) and David Batchelor (England). In the works shown, only one of these artists (Grosse) actually uses paint: Batchelor makes sculptural constructions out of lightboxes or brightly coloured plastic objects and Lausten makes abstracted modernist visualisations of scientific data on computer displays. Grosse uses paint on a large scale, covering long corridors or large spaces with bright swirls, which extend over furniture or other things in the space. The paper brought to the fore the notion of "discipline" and the extent to which the use of specific materials should determine it.

I will only discuss one presentation on a specific artwork, that by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders (Sydney) on their extraordinary "Zwischenräume". This consisted of two machines or robots (not humaniform), each mounted behind a plasterboard wall. Each was equipped with a movable eye (a camera surrounded by LED lights) and a hammer. The robots could move around the wall, and when they got bored they could smash holes in it, to make what they were seeing more interesting for them. The noises of the hammering also served as a communication system between the two robots. This piece builds on earlier work by Rob on "curious agents" (computer software agents that exchanged virtual artworks), but has brought the agents out into the world and equipped them with the ability to act on it.

I will now try to identify some of the themes running through the conference.

Firstly, there was general agreement that the term "new media" is no longer appropriate, though it wasn't clear what term or terms to replace it with. The notion of "remediation" (as in the book by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin), where a newer medium always takes over ideas and conventions from earlier media, was much in evidence; a new medium is never completely new, at least in aesthetics and content. In the context of "remediation" the terms "modulation" and "transduction" were tossed around quite a bit, but, as far as I heard, without any clear definitions.

The other part of the conference title concerned "transdisciplinarity". There were two uses of the word "discipline", firstly referring to an artistic discipline such as painting (the paradigmatic artistic discipline), and secondly referring to an academic discipline. Roy Ascott indicated that a combination of disciplines should produce something new, should transcend the originating disciplines. I don't think any conclusion was reached about transdisciplinarity, but a related notion of "expanded" art forms came up frequently; thus Anne Ring Petersen used the phrase "expanded painting" in her talk. The "expanded" works move away from the traditional materials of a specific artistic discipline, but still carry concerns of that discipline with them. In a way this is the the other face of "new media": at least in the hype, the new media were claimed to abandon or repudiate the old media (the idea debunked by Bolter and Grusin), whereas the works of an "expanded" discipline are still considered to belong to the originating discipline.

A third fairly large and unresolved theme revolved around scientific visualisation and related questions of representation. Jens Hauser opened this up with a discussion of so-called "DNA fingerprinting", which is a technique that takes DNA, cuts it up by so-called restriction enzymes, and spreads the results out in a two-dimensional pattern on a gel. The process is quite complicated and indirect, so the name "fingerprinting" is questionable. Jens introduced the work of the American artist Paul Vanouse, who has used the "fingerprinting" technique to produce patterns on the gel that form things like the copyright sign.

It is clear that in many cases scientific visualisation is a partial and indirect representation of a complex situation; I don't think scientists would disagree with this statement. With one or two of the conference presentations I wasn't clear if scepticism about such visualisations was aimed at the scientific use of them, or at the popular and journalistic reduction implying that such visualisation is somehow akin to direct perception. I would have liked to have heard from scientists as to how they use visualisations, especially when they are very indirect: are visualisations just more or less informal guides as to where a detailed analysis should be carried out, or can a visualisation function in itself as scientific evidence? What role does the more or less unconscious and unanalysed operation of the pattern-matching abilities of our visual system play in science? Lucia Ayala (Germany), an art historian who has been collaborating with an astrophysicist, came fairly close to this question but did not actually discuss it in her presentation.

An area that only came up in a minor way was the implications of machine vision. Linda Matthews and Gavin Perin described a project which, as I understood it, was to provide a building with a cladding so that it would show up as an un-building-like image on a webcam that streams images of Circular Quay to tourism websites. Kathy Cleland discussed so-called "augmented reality", where symbolic data is overlaid on a view of the real world; an example is the mobile phone application Google Goggles. Again the hype has got ahead of the reality: if the overlaid data comes from a commercial provider like Google, the data will have a commercial bias. In this context, someone said something along the lines that "machine vision is uninterpreted", but surely this is not true. My small digital camera recognises faces and adjusts the focus accordingly, and the robots of Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders are even assigning value to what they see. Petra described the robots as "voyeuristic": they are seeing for their own pleasure.

Another area that also only came up in a minor way in the conference was the "executable" aspect of new media: computer programs do things in a way that only has very tenuous precedents in art (and that is not to be confused with notions of "performativity"). Again the work of Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders shows this executable aspect in a striking way. Mitchell Whitelaw brought up the lack of attention to the executable aspect of new media in the conference, and was fairly answered by Paul Thomas to the effect that this aspect was discussed in the re:live conference on media art history held in Melbourne in 2009, of which Paul was one of the organisers. Behind this, though, was the feeling expressed by some conference participants that there is a divide or "incommensurability" between discussions of new media art and mainstream contemporary art. Not everyone agreed with this, but I have a sense of such a divide; maybe it would be a true transdisciplinary project to bridge it.

Although I have mentioned some things that were not much discussed at the conference, it is not clear where they would have fitted in, as we already had two full and very interesting days. There are many things I haven't mentioned, from Edward Colless's discussion of miraculous images such as the face of Jesus on the Veil of Veronica, through to Mitchell Whitelaw's identification of a trend away from the bland homogeneity of computer and TV screens to site-specific, often home-made and low-resolution, variations on the theme of an array of pixels. And Daniel Mafe's artwork, which moves seamlessly from abstract painting to visually similar material created procedurally as abstract animations. And Ian Gwilt's discussion of "compumorphic" art, which draws on computer-inspired forms in the way that biomorphic art draws on natural forms. And much more! Many thanks to Su and Paul and all the other people involved!

Urban Codemakers

2010-08-25T17:38:00.000+10:00

I have a bit part in Troy Innocent's Melbourne Laneways Commission for 2010.

Photo by Troy Innocent. On the left: Yun Tae Nam. On the right: Gordon Monro

Find the project on the net at http://urbancodemakers.net. Register for fieldwork now!

There is also a Facebook page under the name Urban Codemakers and a video on YouTube.

"Tempus Fugit" group exhibition

2010-06-28T10:51:00.003+10:00

I have a piece in the "Tempus Fugit" group exhibition at Space 22 in Ballarat.

Where: Space 22, 22 Main Road, Ballarat.
Opening: Saturday July 3rd, 3-5pm.
Exhibition dates: July 22 to August 8, 2010.
Gallery hours: Thu-Sun 12 noon - 5pm.

The 2010 Biennale of Sydney

2010-06-22T09:51:00.001+10:00

(Long post)

Last week I paid a short visit to Sydney to see the large international art festival, the 2010 Biennale of Sydney, which opened in May and runs until 1st August. The director is British curator David Elliott. The two main locations for the Biennale were the Museum of Contemporary Art near Circular Quay and Cockatoo Island in the middle of Sydney Harbour. Free ferries were provided from Circular Quay to the island. There were smaller numbers of works in the Sydney Botanic Gardens, at the Opera House, at the Art Gallery of NSW, at Pier 2/3 in Walsh Bay and at Artspace in Woolloomoo. I visited all the venues except Pier 2/3, but I certainly couldn't engage with every work. Most of the performances associated with the Biennale took place in its opening week, so I missed them.

The Biennale's theme was "The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age", but as usual the theme didn't mean very much. My first impression was that the Biennale should have been called "The Post-Colonial Art Show", as a large number of works referred in some way to the aftermath of colonisation, from New Zealand artist Brett Graham's stealth bomber decorated with Maori carvings to Canadian Kent Monkman's fanciful panoramas introducing the female (and scantily clad) "Miss Chief Eagle Testickle" into the mythologised history of the American West.

Of course one of the things that both a colonial and a post-colonial emphasis do is to highlight questions of ethnic identity. I should note that Brett Graham is identified as being from the Ngati Koroki sub-tribe of Tainui, and that Kent Monkman has Cree ancestry.

Added to the specifically post-colonial works were another group of works, mostly by Asian artists, relating to cultural disruption that is not directly of Western colonial origin, including the Tibetan/American artist Gonkar Gyatso's response to Tibet's situation within China, and Japanese artist Yamaguchi Akira's panels showing the construction of the modern Shiba Tower in traditional Japanese isometric style, complete with isometric smog. Completing the non-Western theme were some groups of works by Indigenous artists pursuing their own cultural concerns, including an impressive group of funeral poles by Yolngu artists from Arnhem Land and bark-cloth works from Dapeni Jonevari (Mokokari) and Mala Nari (Matosi), two women from, respectively, the Emate and Ömie groups in Papua New Guinea.

There were quite a few works that didn't fit into the groups that I have listed, such as American artist Bill Viola's video Incarnation, one of his series where people walk through a wall of water, and quite compelling. Perhaps the best-known artist represented in the Biennale was the French/American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, represented by several striking sculptures, including one of her "cell" constructions. Bourgeois recently died at the age of 98 after a distinguished career.

It is clear from David Elliott's history as a curator that he is interested in cultural disruption and power relationships between cultures, so the emphasis of the Biennale is not surprising. What did surprise me was the small number of works relating to climate change, rising sea levels, loss of bio-diversity and the like, surely very pressing contemporary concerns, and appropriate to "survival in a precarious age". There were a few works on this theme, such as Australian Janet Laurence's "hospital for sick plants" in the Botanic Gardens. And French/German/North African artist Kader Attia's installation Kasbah, a construction representing the roofs of a shanty-town, certainly refers to over-population and over-crowded cities.

Cockatoo Island is a remarkable location, packed with buildings reflecting its history first as a prison and then as an important naval dockyard and ship-building yard. There are large cranes and other machines and huge sheds, as well as tunnels through the sandstone; the environment is in danger of upstaging the art works. This didn't apply to the spectacular installation by Chinese/American artist Cai Guo-Qiang, consisting of nine white motorcars (real ones), seven of them suspended in the air and with rods bearing flashing lights protruding from them. The whole thing looks like, and is intended to look like, a sequence of stills from a movie of an exploding car. Another installation that fitted well into its space was the full-scale plywood mock-up of the Hubble Space Telescope by Australian artist Peter Hennessy. A third installation at Cockatoo Island that fitted its location well, and one that I really liked, was the photographs of electrical discharges by Japanese/American artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. These images, which were both delicate and powerful, were placed in the old Power House, where electric current from the mainland was transformed to meet the requirements of the island; a lot of the electrical apparatus remains.

Of the small number of works relating art and science, Sugimoto's was my favourite, though the large sculpture Neuron outside the Musem of Contemporary Art by American Roxy Paine came a close second. The installation Molecular in the old guardhouse on Cockatoo island by Romanian/American artist Serge Spitzer was a disappointment to me. It consisted of a large number of small grey balls spread about on the floor (and they weren't grouped into molecules). Unfortunately I missed Brodie Ellis's work based on a solar eclipse.

The occurrence in the Biennale of both Australian Aboriginal art and art relating to science led me to think about the sorts of knowledge needed to appreciate different kinds of art. I feel at a loss with Aboriginal art because I do not know the associated stories, images and tracts of country, and so I cannot tell how the stories and so forth are being treated in the works; I can only admire the works as abstract aesthetic objects. Since I have a scientific background I feel that I can make some judgement on how scientific ideas are treated in a work of art.

It appears that at some stage there was an intent to structure at least part of the Bienniale around the work of the American film-maker, animator and influential collector of various forms of folk and indigenous music, Harry Smith; the Biennale subtitle "Songs of Survival" suggests this. In the event there were only a few pieces that really related to Smith's work. There was a long and rather surreal animation by Smith himself at Artspace, and a project by Eileen Simpson and Ben White to make available out-of-copyright recordings of versions of the folk songs collected by Smith. The work using folksongs by Warren Fahey and Mic Gruchy at Cockatoo Island is also linked to Smith's work.

A bigger theme, at least as far as catalogue essays were concerned, was the supposed final end of the European Enlightenment project, linked with the purportedly "equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other" (from Elliott's introductory essay). Sydney art critic John McDonald noted that a disproportionate number of the non-Indigenous local artists in the Biennale are or have been represented by the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney, which suggests a certain hierarchy in Elliott's view of the local art scene. More fundamentally, although there may not be a hierarchy of cultures in the Biennale, there is a hierarchy of taste: realism (except perhaps in video) is out; magical surrealism is in, as is a certain sort of political commentary acceptable to Western art critics. This is no surprise: the Sydney Biennale is just following the norm for such events in representing a globalised contemporary elite Western taste, as described by Julian Stallabrass in his book Art Incorporated (2004).

I didn't like the graphic design created for the Biennale by British designer Jonathan Barnbrook: I found it cluttered, distracting, difficult to read (in this respect the antithesis of good design) and full of what appeared to be irrelevant graphics from old mathematical and scientific sources. To defend Barnbrook on the last point: some of these graphics have a connection with the animation work of Harry Smith mentioned above, and perhaps when Barnbrook received his brief Smith's work was expected to play a bigger role.

Conclusions? A lot of interesting things to see, certainly. A curator ought to be allowed to have a particular viewpoint, so I don't know if the rather small representation of works about the environment represents a widespread view among international curators or simply Elliott's own interest or lack thereof. And my favourite work amongst those I saw? Probably the painting Black Light by the Iranian/English artist Shirazeh Houshiary, with minute and very detailed calligraphy, and part of a striking triptych. Though I also very much liked the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto mentioned above, and I had a soft spot for the painting Big Raven by American artist Fred Tomaselli. And then I could add one of Gonkar Gyatso's hyper-collages, or Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's videos about the reactions of Thai villagers to Western art... So, yes, lots of interesting things to see, and it is unreasonable to expect more than that in such a big and sprawling show.

"AUSthetic" in Federation Square

2010-06-08T09:11:00.001+10:00

I have a tiny part of the "AUSthetic" video screening program in Federation Square, Melbourne, 3-10 June 2010. My piece Triangular Vibrations was used as part of a mashup by VJ Sustenance made for ANAT in 2009, and this mashup in turn is being shown on the big screen at Fed Square, some time between 10pm and midnight. There is some info here.

New exhibition "Difference Engine" in Ballarat

2010-04-18T18:27:00.002+10:00

I have an exhibition in Ballarat in May, showing work under the title "Difference Engine". The works consist of small patterns that have been evolved in the computer to be different from one another. They are mostly digital prints, but the computer program that carries out the evolutionary process will be there as well.

Venue: Arthur Gallery, 35 Mair St, Ballarat (a very short walk from Ballarat station)
Exhibition dates: 6th May to 29th May 2010
Opening: Saturday 8th May, 5pm - 7pm
Gallery hours: Thursday to Saturday 10am - 3pm or by appointment

Also I will be giving an artist talk at Arthur Gallery at 2pm on Saturday 29th May.

Design After Nature - again

2010-02-27T13:25:00.000+11:00

The recent exhibition "Design After Nature" by the Centre for Electronic Media Art at Monash University, Melbourne is re-appearing at the Frankston Arts Centre (Melbourne).

Venue: Frankston Arts Centre, 37 Davey St, Frankston (a short walk from Frankston station)
Exhibition dates: 23rd Feb to 14th March 2010
Gallery hours: Monday to Saturday 9am-5pm, Sunday 12-4pm

There is a map here.
The works are described as "experimental ecosystems", generally computer-based in some way. It is shaping up to be a very interesting exhibition.
People involved: Oliver Bown, Joel Collins, Aland Dorin, Alice Eldridge, Mark Guglielmetti, Indae Hwang, Troy Innocent, Taras Kowaliw, Jon McCormack, Gordon Monro, Yun Tae Nam, Ben Porter, Mitchell Whitelaw.
All welcome!

Design After Nature Exhibition

2009-11-28T10:44:00.007+11:00

The Centre for Electronic Media Art at Monash University, Melbourne is putting on an exhibition of recent work called Design After Nature.

Venue: Guildford Lane Gallery, 20-24 Guildford Lane, Melbourne (near Melbourne Central station).
Exhibition dates: 3rd - 20th December 2009
Opening: Thursday 3rd December, 6-8pm.
Gallery hours: Wed-Fri 12noon - 9pm; Sat, Sun 12noon - 5pm

The works are described as "experimental ecosystems", generally computer-based in some way. It is shaping up to be a very interesting exhibition.

People involved: Oliver Bown, Joel Collins, Aland Dorin, Alice Eldridge, Mark Guglielmetti, Indae Hwang, Troy Innocent, Taras Kowaliw, Jon McCormack, Gordon Monro, Yun Tae Nam, Ben Porter, Mitchell Whitelaw.

All welcome!

For those on Facebook, there is a Facebook Event for the opening.

View Larger Map